When we bought this house, I dreamed that when we were finished with the minor renovations we had planned that I’d share it here… a house tour is what I think the lifestyle bloggers call it.
While the pictures we are using to sell our house depict this place as “Pinterest Perfect,” clean, bright, and fresh, they are soulless compared to thousands that whoever buys this home won’t see.
There are things about this place that I wish I could convey to them, the realities, the things that make up the heart of this home.
From the meaningful messes…
To the tantrums…
This house was not filled with perfection, and we are better for that. This house was chaotic, and borderline hazardous at times. This house was loud, and it smelled like… children lived here. And a little like dirty dishes sometimes.
And dogs.
This house is where we learned to be parents.
And where we learned how to live with very little sleep.
It’s where we all learned how to be a family…
And where each of our babies took their first steps…
These walls are painted in laughter…
And these floors are coated in bliss…
These yards grow flowers and fruit trees, fertilized by the sounds of children playing…
The reality of this house we are selling far exceeds the dream.
I wish I could put that in the MLS.
(For those wondering, the dream is actually doing a great job selling this place. We have multiple offers already!)
This is officially the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere in my entire life. Not just the longest I’ve lived in a home, but the longest I’ve lived in the same zip code.
So maybe that’s why, for the first time ever, I feel like I might cry when I think of closing our front door behind me for the last time. Or maybe it’s that I stepped in the door for the first time when my first baby was just 4 weeks old, and brought 2 more newborns through it’s door since. Maybe it’s because one of our beloved dogs lived out his last years of life here. Maybe it’s because we have poured literally our blood, sweat, and tears into transforming this place from builder-grade blah to home-sweet-perfect-for-us-home.
I guess it’s probably all of those reasons.
We’re selling the dream, y’all. We’re selling this house that we long thought was “just a starter home,” a house I had to fight to make myself love. But once I did? Oh, it was… it IS a deep love.
There’s a story in here about finding gratitude for the things we have in life, about making the best of what’s already ours.
But I have a showing tomorrow at 10, and a million emails to catch up on. I basically stopped working last week to help put all of this in motion, and I have no time to share meaningful life lessons right now. Maybe some other day.
We are selling the dream because we can finally, with confidence, say that we are ready for another dream. One with a much bigger yard, and a little bit more room to spread out. One with a dedicated space for me to do all the creative things I love to do, that I get paid to do, that end up taking over our kitchen… and our office… and our closet… and everywhere.
We are selling the dream to someone who is looking for their own dream. One that looks exactly like this…
I was a total dork and wrote up a letter that I printed and left on the counter, all about how they could pick peaches and blackberries in the backyard, and the awesome closet organization, and how lovely the natural light that fills this house is.
I was tempted to draw “Ebola Free!” on the kitchen island chalkboard, but I guess you never do know if future homeowners come with a sense of humor.
So my job has been, and will continue to be until this place sells, to sell this “dream” to someone. The dream that they can move into this light-filled, pristine home and have a perfect life. One where they will barely lift a finger gardening, and still harvest buckets of fruit every year. One where their office will sport THE barn doors and DIY track that have been shared on Pinterest over 85k times. One where they walk their perfect children to school, and then their perfect children come home to play in a perfectly organized playroom, where they nicely put away all their toys, just like the perfect children who lived here before them.
And I know that’s the stuff that sells, right? The dreams are what sell houses. Not the realities.
Oh, but the realities have so much more heart….
If you know someone who is interested in this dream we’re selling, hit up our fantastic real estate agent, Adrienne, from Team Kirkpatrick. We’re in the Dallas area, specifically the Wylie/Sachse/Murphy area in the northeast suburbs.